Institute News

This week’s Conversation article is authored by two of MSU’s own: Artemis Spyrou, an associate professor of nuclear astrophysics, and Wolfgang Mittig, a physics professor. In their article “Atomic age began 75 years ago with the first controlled nuclear chain reaction,” Spyrou and Mittig give a brief overview of the history of nuclear physics before diving into the remaining questions scientists have about neutron emission.

Mark Urban-Lurain, AACR PI, was interviewed about the AACR project on the Teach Better Podcast. Doug McKee and Edward O’Neill talk with Mark about how AACR uses machine learning to evaluate and analyze free text answers in order to shed new light on student understanding and misconceptions.

Ann Austin, who is a professor of higher education and an associate dean for research in the MSU College of Education, has just been given three grants totaling $2.7 million from the National Science Foundation to fund research on undergraduate STEM education. Austin will study how institutional reforms in policy and curricula can be leveraged to increase success rates in undergrad STEM classes.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Andrew D. Hwang recently published an article called “Millions, billions, trillions: How to make sense of numbers in the news” on The Conversation, an independent source for news and academic articles from research communities made for public consumption. Hwang’s article highlights the struggle that the average American has when trying to contextualize the amount of money we’re talking about when we discuss it in terms of millions, billions, and trillions.

Congratulations are in order for the co-director of PERL, Danny Caballero, who won the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award this year. Caballero teaches Physics 481, an electricity and magnetism course, and it was in that very class that President Lou Anna K. Simon dropped by to present Caballero with the award.